For many centuries people have pierced their ears so that they can wear earrings involving either "wire" earrings or "post" earrings. In a wire earring, a dangling ornament may be provided with a U-shaped wire at one end of the ornament, with the other end of the U-shaped wire being threaded through the ear and then engaged with a catch provided adjacent the ornament.
In a post earring, the earring is connected to the ear by the end of a slender short rod or post being pushed through the opening in the person's ear, with a friction nut or clutch thereafter being slid onto this other end, to prevent loss of the earring. Unfortunately, the friction nut or clutch sometimes slips off of the relatively smooth sidewalls of an ordinary earring post, which in some instances may lead to the loss of the earring.
In recent years an improvement has been made, designed to prevent the loss of post-type earrings, with this involving the threading of a portion of the post remote from the earring itself. The element used to secure the post on the ear is a clutch, which is a device having a base portion equipped with a central opening about which a plurality of springy fingers are arrayed in a substantially evenly spaced relationship. The free ends of these fingers are being adapted to being brought together in a manner in which these ends tightly engage the threaded exterior of the earring post as the clutch is inserted thereover. In this way the threads on the post are effective to prevent the clutch member from sliding off.
The Block Pat. No. 4,170,118 describes an arrangement of this type in some detail, setting forth that although the clutch can be readily inserted over the threaded portion of an earring post, the clutch cannot be removed without the clutch actually being unscrewed. This is because the tips of the springy fingers that passed over the convolutions of the threading are held in the threading, for these tips of the fingers are biased so as to catch on the flanks of the threads.
It has previously been known that threaded posts can be substituted on an existing earring by having a jeweler or other such craftsman cut off the original post, and then weld on a new, threaded post. Such a procedure as this may well involve temperatures being applied to the earring in the vicinity of 1200.degree. F. to 2000.degree. F., thus requiring the removal of the ornament from some earrings, in order to prevent damage thereto. As is obvious, this will necessarily involve a considerable expense.
It is therefore to be seen that a clear need exists for a person having earrings that are valuable for reasons of sentiment or otherwise, to be easily able to apply threading to unthreaded earring posts, to prevent loss of the earring, and such an invention is described herein.